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Greetings, and welcome to VIEWING THE CLASSICS. Here you'll find capsule reviews of vintage movies from the early days of cinema through the 1970s, with a special emphasis on sci-fi, horror, and mystery movies. Be sure to check out the Pages links, where you can find a Film Index of all my reviews, links to the reviews organized by cast members, directors, and other contributors, and links to my reviews of the films of talented young director Joshua Kennedy.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Blood Of Dracula (1957)

Starring Sandra Harrison, Louise Lewis, Gail Ganley, Jerry Blaine, Heather Ames
Directed by Herbert L. Strock(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)A troubled teenage girl is shipped off to boarding school by her disinterested parents, where a chemistry teacher eyes her as the subject of an experiment that will unleash a vampire.

This is probably the weakest of writer/producer Herman Cohen's teenage monster movies, as it borrows heavily from the formula established in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, although it's still fun, and fans of Cohen's work should find enough to enjoy here. The presence of cruel school cliques and Lewis' turn as the villain trying to prove herself in a "man's world" offer some freshness even though hers and Harrison's characters are essentially copies of Whit Bissell's and Michael Landon's from the previous film, and a musical number plays exactly like the one in Werewolf. The monster makeup for Harrison, also somewhat derivative of Landon's, is among the most grotesque for any cinema vampire, which was what Cohen and Strock were probably aiming for, but the vampire attack sequences are largely uninspired with routine staging. I still enjoy this picture and like that Cohen tried to build a female monster movie in a fairly fresh setting for a horror film, but it's not original enough to stand on its own legs.